8
‘It could be a copycat, sir,’ Workman said, in a tone of forced calm. ‘Zoe Reynolds’ murder was a fixture in the press for months, and the spotlight was shone again when Carolynn was on trial. You’d have to have spent the last two years living in a mud hut in Papua New Guinea not to have read about it, not to know all the details.’ A pause. ‘Everything.’
Eyes fixed on the misty hummock that was the Isle of Wight fifteen kilometres across the Solent to the south, the curved grey back of a breaching whale, Marilyn nodded, hoping she wouldn’t notice that his hands were shaking.
Everything.
Workman was right. The column centimetres the Zoe Reynolds case had occupied would add up to kilometres, every sordid bloody detail raked over countless times, however hard he had tried to keep some things back, just a few elements of the poor little girl’s murder, to preserve some dignity for her memory if nothing else. Zoe Reynolds. That name forever seared into his memory as if it had been cattle-branded on to his temporal lobe. The statistics of child abductions and murders in the UK branded there also, from the many hours he’d spent trawling through the data, buttonholing experts, interviewing convicted paedophiles to try to understand their thought processes, eliminating paedophilia as a possibility, cycling back again and again to the conviction that it must have been the child’s mother, that he had been right to pursue her as hard as he had done, despite being unable to amass enough evidence to nail a guilty verdict.
In the twenty-two years since he joined Surrey and Sussex Major Crimes, Zoe Reynolds’ murder was the only case that he still took to bed with him at night; his own personal abject failure. Around two hundred children were unlawfully killed in the UK each year, with at least three quarters of those deaths due to abuse or neglect by a parent – filicide – or other close relation. And those were only the reported cases. The woman he’d spoken with at the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to children had told him that the statistic was an under-estimation, that each year some parents literally got away with murder. Not all parents who kill their children live on benefits in some sink estate, she’d told him. Affluent parents have tempers too. Affluent parents lose control. The inference wasn’t lost on Marilyn: fall down the stairs in a middle-class household and you’ve slipped; do the same in a tower block with alcoholic parents and your mum or dad threw you down them.
‘A copycat,’ he murmured, finally acknowledging Workman’s comment, yanking on the knot to loosen his tie, lessen the tightening in his airways. Copycat crimes were far from uncommon. Two years to the day. ‘Yes, it could be.’
The soft sigh that he wasn’t supposed to have heard over the shore breeze told him that she had noted the lack of conviction in his tone. She’d been by his side throughout that first case, had been affected by little Zoe’s murder – in truth, even more than he had been. She hadn’t, though, shared his dogged conviction that the mother, Carolynn Reynolds, was responsible. Despite knowing the statistic on child murders as well as he did, she found it hard to accept that a mother could kill her own daughter. Not that pretty, polished mother. Not that daughter. Not in that cold-blooded way. Given Workman’s personal history – her struggle to come to terms with her own childlessness due to infertility – he had doubted her ability to remain objective. He’d come close to having her sidelined for the duration of the investigation, but eventually decided against because losing DS Sarah Workman would have been akin to hacking off his right arm. He had needed her support, particularly with so public a case, his work under such close scrutiny, so he’d kept her with him but monitored her closely, tempering her opinions with a spade full of salt. He’d caught her a few times, studying the crime scene photographs of the dead child, wallowing unhealthily in them, he’d thought at the time. He’d done the same, but privately, and even as he was looking for the umpteenth time, he knew that what he was doing was mentally destructive, the visual equivalent of sticking needles under his fingernails.
‘We owe it to this little girl to—’
Marilyn raised a hand, cutting her off.
‘We do indeed. And we will.’ He dropped his hand to her shoulder. ‘And I don’t need a lecture about objectivity, thanks, Sarah. Come on, let’s leave Burrows to it, get back to base and brief the team. I’ll start jibbering if I don’t get away from the noise of these bloody seagulls.’
* * *
The journalists who had thronged the crime scene on the beach seemed to have made it back to the station in Chichester quicker than he had, which, given he was still driving his beloved Z3 – sixteen years old, 143,000 miles on the clock and performing to every bit of its age and mileage – he had to acknowledge wasn’t surprising.
Monitoring police radio frequencies 24/7 for the first whiff of a heinous crime, the press piranhas had gone into a frenzy the moment they found one. Marilyn was engulfed as soon as he stepped from the car: voice recorders and cameras, like the black eyes of Cyclops, shoved into his face. Shouldering through them, he made it to the concrete steps into the station, where at least his back was covered by the closed front door. Stopping, he turned under the stone arch, squinting against the sinking sun’s rays, knowing that he might as well face the pack now than delay it. Pain now, double pain with bells on later when they’d had a chance to feed off each other, speculate, the process always made more creative, the conclusions more
